Ethiopia prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn resigns

Hailemariam Desalegn says he has submitted his resignation as both Ethiopia's prime minister and chairman of the country's ruling coalition.

Hailemariam's announcement comes amid a political crisis and lingering unrest in the Horn of Africa country, which has been releasing thousands of political prisoners to ease tensions.

"Unrest and a political crisis have led to the loss of lives and displacement of many," Hailemariam said in a televised address on Thursday.

"I see my resignation as vital in the bid to carry out reforms that would lead to sustainable peace and democracy," he said.

Hailemariam added, however, that he will stay on as prime minister in a caretaker capacity, until the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and the country's parliament accept his resignation and name a new premier.

Al Jazeera's Mohammed Adow, reporting from Doha, said parliament will meet on Friday to choose Hailemariam successor, Adow said, noting that Ethiopian Foreign Minister Workneh Gebeyehu is considered to be a leading candidate for the position.

"If they choose a candidate from either of the two main groups who have been protesting for most of the past three years, the Oroma and the Amhara, then it will be interesting to see how they are going to appease the other group that they leave out of this coalition," he said.

Hundreds of people have died in a wave of violence across Ethiopia, initially sparked by an urban development plan in the capital, Addis Ababa, in 2015.

The unrest spread as demonstrations against political restrictions and human rights abuses broke out.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/02/ethiopia-prime-minister-hailemariam-desalegn-resigns-180215115215988.html

Ethiopia: Anti-government protest in Shashamene, Oromia region

General strike and anti-government protests are underway in Ethiopia’s Oromia region. The following raw video footage is from Shashamene (West Arsi Zone, Oromia Region, Ethiopia).

Ethiopian political prisoners and their accounts of torture

The Association for Human Rights in Ethiopia (AHRE) is pleased to announce the launch of its 2^nd report, “Ethiopian political prisoners and their accounts of torture”. This report aims to provide an overview of the prison situation in Ethiopia, with a special focus on the different forms of abuses prisoners are subjected with in different prisons in Ethiopia.

In the past three years, following the protests in different parts of the country, mainly in Amhara and Oromia regions, the number of detainees has dramatically soared, that in turn augmented the reports of abuse in Ethiopia’s prisons. Furthermore, detainees accused of burning Qilinto prison have also reported to suffer torture during interrogations, mainly to extract forced confessions that implicate the detainees to the crime. Many have testified in court to enduring varying degree of abuses at the hands of security officers. The abuses include beatings; verbal, physical and psychological harassment; solitary confinement; denying medical access etc.

This report documents and brings to attention some of the abuses and ill-treatments committed against prisoners detaineed in recent years, mainly following Amhara and Oromo protests, and those charged for allegedly setting Qilinto prison ablaze. In addition, the report also takes a closer look at investigations conducted by Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, under the court’s order, and discusses the findings and its implications.

To read full report in PDF: Ethiopian-prisoner-and-their-accounts-of-torture.rep2018.pdf

Managing Ethiopia’s Political Crisis

Managing Ethiopia’s current political crisis requires going beyond democratic reform and instead thinking about the political economy and institutions that shape elite competition along ethnic lines.

By Goitom Gebreluel & Biniam Bedasso (Al Jazeera) | *Nemera Mamo is a co-author of this article. He is a teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London.

Ethiopia has been experiencing recurrent mass protests, riots and ethnic conflicts over the past two years that have claimed the lives of thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands.

These events have led observers and members of the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) to conclude that the very survival of the Ethiopian state is at stake.

State collapse is so far an extreme and unlikely scenario given that the conflicting parties are internal actors in the system and have a vested interest in its survival. A more likely but still dangerous scenario is a long-term vicious cycle of political conflict and economic stagnation that cripples state and society.

Much of Ethiopia’s appeal to global investors lies in the high-level political commitment to economic growth. Political instability risks eroding the hard-won economic gains it has registered over the past decade.

Analysts and the international community have often attributed the current crisis either to Ethiopia’s ethnonational federal system or the near total curtailment of political space since the disputed parliamentary elections in 2005.

While political liberalism is a moral imperative on its own accord – and long overdue – it is, nevertheless, an insufficient solution to the political quagmire that the Ethiopian state finds itself in. The ethnonational federation is also not the primary source of the problem, and its abolishment is neither desirable nor a realistic proposition.

The government’s response to the problem has also been inadequate. It has primarily attributed this to corruption and a stalled democratic process. Based on this diagnosis it has taken important yet inadequate measures such as releasing political prisoners, initiating dialogue with opposition groups and demoted officials.

Managing Ethiopia’s current political crisis requires going beyond democratic reform and instead thinking about the political economy and institutions that shape elite competition along ethnic lines. The two most important reform measures that should be embarked upon immediately in this regard are devolving more power to the regional states in accordance with the Constitution and de-ethnicising elite competition at the federal level.

Time to Repeal Anti-Terrorism Law in Ethiopia

Ethiopia’s so called economic development policies have not only ignored but enabled and exacerbated civil and human rights abuses in the country.

By Anuradha Mittal |

Oakland, CA (IPS)―With the African Union celebrating the African Year of Human Rights at its 26th summit, at its headquarters in Addis, Ethiopia, the venue raises serious concerns about commitment to human rights.

Ethiopia’s so called economic development policies have not only ignored but enabled and exacerbated civil and human rights abuses in the country. Case and point is the ongoing land grabbing affecting several regions of the country. Under the controversial “villagization” program, the Ethiopian government is forcibly relocating over 1.5 million people to make land available to investors for so called economic growth. Since last November, the country’s ruling party, EPRDF’s, “Master Plan” to expand the capital Addis has been the flashpoint for protests in Oromia which will impact some 2 million people. At least 140 protestors have been killed by security forces while many more have been injured and arrested, including political leaders like Bekele Gerba, Deputy Chairman of the Oromo Federalist Congress, Oromia’s largest legally registered political party. Arrested on December 23, 2015, his whereabouts remain unknown.

Political marginalization, arbitrary arrests, beatings, murders, intimidation, and rapes mark the experience of communities around Ethiopia defending their land rights. This violence in the name of delivering economic growth is built on the 2009 Anti-Terrorism Proclamation, which has allowed the Ethiopian government secure complete hegemonic authority by suppressing any form of dissent.

A new report, Ethiopia’s Anti-Terrorism Law: A Tool to Stifle Dissent, by the Oakland Institute and the Environmental Defender Law Center, authored by lawyers including representatives from leading international law firms, unravels the 2009 Proclamation. It confirms that the law is designed and used by the Ethiopian Government as a tool of repression to silence its critics. It criminalizes basic human rights, like the freedom of speech and assembly. Its definition of “terrorist act,” does not conform with international standards given the law defines terrorism in an extremely broad and vague way, providing the ruling party with an iron fist to punish words and acts that would be legal in a democracy.

The law’s staggering breadth and vagueness, makes it impossible for citizens to know or even predict what conduct may violate the law, subjecting them to grave criminal sanctions. This has resulted in a systematic withdrawal of free speech in the country as newspaper journalists and editors, indigenous leaders, land rights activists, bloggers, political opposition members, and students are charged as terrorists. In 2010, journalists and governmental critics were arrested and tortured in the lead-up to the national election. In 2014, six privately owned publications closed after government harassment; at least 22 journalists, bloggers, and publishers were criminally charged; and more than 30 journalists fled the country in fear of being arrested under repressive laws.

The law also gives the police and security services unprecedented new powers and shifts the burden of proof to the accused. Ethiopia has abducted individuals from foreign countries including the British national Andy Tsege and the Norwegian national, Okello Akway Ochalla, and brought them to Ethiopia to face charges of violating the anti-terrorism law. Such abductions violate the terms of extradition treaties between Ethiopia and other countries; violate the territorial sovereignty of the other countries; and violate the fundamental human rights of those charged under the law. Worse still, many of those charged report having been beaten or tortured, as in the case of Mr. Okello. The main evidence courts have against such individuals are their so-called confessions.

Some individuals charged under Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism law are being prosecuted for conduct that occurred before that law entered into force. These prosecutions violate the principles of legality and non-retroactivity, which Ethiopia is bound to uphold both under international law as well as the Charter 22 of its own constitution.

A few other key examples of those charged under the law, include the 9 bloggers; Pastor Omot Agwa, former translator for the World Bank Inspection Panel; and journalists Reeyot Alemu and Eskinder Nega; and hundreds more, all arrested under the Anti-Terrorism law.

It has been a fallacious tradition in development thought to equate economic underdevelopment with repressive forms of governance and economic modernity with democratic rule. Yet Ethiopia forces us to confront that its widely celebrated economic renaissance by its Western allies and donor countries is dependent on violent autocratic governance. The case of Ethiopia should compel the US and the UK to question their own complicity in supporting the Ethiopian regime, the west’s key ally in Africa.

Given the compelling analysis provided by the report, it is imperative that the international community demands that until such time as Ethiopian government revises its anti-terrorism law to bring it into conformity with international standards, it repeals the use of this repressive piece of legislation.

Case and point is the controversial resettlement program under which the Ethiopian government seeks to relocate 1.5 million people as part of an economic development plan. Research by groups including the Oakland Institute, International Rivers Network, Human Rights Watch, and Inclusive Development International, among others, as well as journalists.

Perhaps there is hesitation to confront this because it would implicate the global flows of development assistance that make possible rule by the EPRDF. Receiving a yearly average of 3.5 billion dollars in development aid, Ethiopia tops lists of development aid recipients of USAID, DfID, and the World Bank. Staggeringly, international assistance represents 50 to 60 per cent of the Ethiopian national budget. Evidently, foreign assistance is indispensable to the national governance. At the face of this dependency, the Ethiopian government exercises repressive hegemony over Ethiopian political and civil expression.

It is the responsibility of international donors to account for the political effects of development assistance with thorough and consistent investigations and substantive demand for political reform and democratic practices as a condition for sustained international aid. This will inevitably mean a new type of Ethiopian renaissance, one that seeks the simultaneous establishment of democratic governance and improving economic conditions. ▄

Eskinder Nega, Andualem Arage and Abebe Kesto Refused to Sign ‘False Confession’ Paper for Pardon

Journalist Eskinder Nega and opposition leaders Andualem Arage and Abebe Kesto were among 746 prisoners set for release, but they refused to sign letters of pardon from the government.

By Tsion Tadesse (VOA) |

Ethiopian journalist Eskinder Nega and two prominent opposition figures have refused to sign letters of pardon from the government, holding up their planned release from prison.

Eskinder and opposition leaders Andualem Arage and Abebe Kesto — all critics of the government — are among 746 prisoners set for release following an announcement Thursday by Ethiopia’s attorney general.

But Eskinder’s wife, Serkalem Facil, has told VOA’s Horn of Africa Service that her husband declined to sign the letter of pardon because it states he was a member of Ginbot 7, a political organization banned in Ethiopia.

“Eskinder, Andualem and others were summoned by prison officers. They were asked to sign a form saying they are members of the Ginbot 7 movement as a precondition for their release,” Serkalem said. “Eskinder refused to sign the form, saying that he is not a member of the organization. So, I know there is no deal.”

Fantu Aragie, the sister of Andualem Arage, said her brother and Abebe Kesto also refused to sign the pardon letter.

“The three of them refused to ask the government for a pardon. In fact, they informed them that the government should ask them for a pardon,” she said.

All three men remained in prison Friday.

The majority of the prisoners set to be freed were arrested on charges of terrorism, inciting violence or religious extremism. Human rights groups say the arrests were, in fact, aimed at silencing opponents and critics of Ethiopia’s de facto one-party state.

Continue reading this story at VOA News